I’ve used lots of nice notes applications on Mac, such as nvAlt, nvUltra, Bear, Ulysses, Drafts and even Apple Notes. There are plenty of alternatives on Mac, but not so much on Windows, and unfortunately I have to use Windows at work.I found Obsidian and it seems to click lot of things, such as saving native Markdown as files, etc. So it looks like an app I could use.
One thing in the interface I’m used to in the apps over the years with nvAlt, Bear etc is to have the notes listed from the last modified. Then you can filter those notes with a search bar, staying ordered the same way.
Obsidian has the file view that can be ordered this way, but it doesn’t have a search bar. The search bar also has a view to order it this way, but it’s empty by default. I’m not sure why these views couldn’t be combined so that you have one view with a search filter. But for my needs it would be enough if for instance the search view would by default show all notes instead of an empty list.
That seems logical. Empty string matches all files.
E.g. empty string in double quotes ("") in search-bar in File-Explorer in Windows7 displays flat list of all files from all subdirectories. With “Details view” selected, they can be ordered and filtered in multiple ways (by date, by file type, …). Without “” in search bar, only top hierarchy level is displayed in list (direct content of active directory)
The main reason in my opinion is that the search is much more powerful than just filtering files or directories. In addition to that, it’s possible to search in the file contents, filter for tags, show additional context for the results (which needs extra space), and the option to copy results as links (e.g. to create MOCs). I recommend reading more about search and search operators here: Search - Obsidian Help .
The separate search panel is a lot more flexible, e.g. I can have the current search displayed, while I open or move notes in the file explorer if I need, and come back to the search pane again to continue what I was doing before. Combining those views, will only let you use one at a time (at least from what I understood from your feature request).
Yes. My request is not exactly to have them unified, though the title suggests. It’s more that neither of the views lets me use it like I’m used to with other notes programs such as Bear and nvAlt. Notes sorted from last modified to older, and a search bar to filter the list. It could perhaps be a search filter in the files list that preserves the selected ordering too.
Thanks! That helps a lot in clarifying the feature request. There is a path operator and you can already sort search results by last modified, could you go a bit more into detail about what would be the difference with your feature request?
Yes, I noticed you can sort them from last modified in both the files and search view. I don’t know if you’ve seen how some apps like Bear and nvAlt work (they’re Apple/mac only apps). You have the notes sorted from the last modified to oldest as the default view, which makes sense because you’re usually interested in the last modified notes. Then a search bar lets you filter it with search terms, tags and so on.
Maybe I’m just used to it working like that, but for me it’s often very fast to find the note I need with that nvAlt/nvUltra (beta)/Bear, etc like search system where the notes are ordered by time, then filtered with search. The current files or search view don’t really allow to fully replicate the nvAlt kind of use. Files view could have a search bar, or maybe the search view could show all files by default.
I’ve also tried to use the cmd+O search thing to quickly find notes, it seems like a good option too. But my use case basically is to jump to a note I need, such as some late Ruby code snippet or another recent note, in a super fast time with minimal keypresses etc.